Things you might want to change in Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) desktop, part 1

After installing Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) desktop, there are some things you might want to change. This article focus on system configuration (mostly editing in /etc) and requires superuser access (using sudo). Some of this changes requires reboot to take effect.

Fix terminal font rendering bug

There is a bug which gives bad font rendering in the terminal window. Fix it by doing this in a terminal:

cd /etc/fonts/cond.d
sudo unlink 10-hinting-medium.conf
sudo ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf

Fix bug in DHCP client

Fix a bug in the DHCP client described here.

Use GNU nano as default console text editor instead of vi

Add this line to /etc/profile:

export EDITOR=nano

Mount /tmp as tmpfs if you have plenty of RAM

Add this to /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh:

32a33,35
>       domount tmpfs "" /tmp -omode=1777,nodev,exec,nosuid
>       # this is necessary to avoid that files are removed later in the boot process
>       touch /tmp/.clean

And add this to /etc/init.d/mtab.sh:

100a101,101
>       domtab tmpfs /tmp "tmp" -omode=1777,nodev,exec,nosuid

Increase the limit of number of open files

Add this to /etc/security/limits.conf:

42a43,44
> *               hard    nofile          65536
> *               soft    nofile          65536

Setup some useful NTP servers and sync clock at each login

Setup some useful NTP servers in /etc/default/ntpdate.

Create a file /etc/X11/gdm/PostLogin/Default:

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be run before any setup is run on behalf of the user and is
# useful if you for example need to do some setup to create a home directory
# for the user or something like that.  $HOME, $LOGIN and such will all be
# set appropriately and this script is run as root.

ntpdate-debian -s
if [ $? -gt 0 ];
then
        logger -p user.err "ntpdate failed"
        zenity --warning --text "ntpdate failed"
else
        logger -p user.info "ntpdate successful"
fi

See also packages you might want to remove.